For the last several election cycles, individuals with at least a bachelors degree have voted majority republican. As have individuals with some college education. Voting patterns for people with a high school diploma are pretty evenly split between the parties. Democrats have consistent advantages in individuals with no high school degree and Post graduate degrees. So I am not sure that calling people who do not agree with the liberal interpretation of college funding or tenure policies in Wisconsin uneducated is either helpful or accurate.
And again, if you are speaking of vindictiveness and irrationality as those terms are commonly used, it is not Walker who has acted that way in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin currently spends 10% above the national average (as a function of income) on its Higher Ed system. Sorry, but it is neither irrational nor a sign of stupidity to have a debate over whether the state should maintain funding at that level. Clearly, the voters in Wisconsin support Walker’s policies on a macro level. Obviously there is sufficient support in the state generally to pass the budget.
Seems to me an intellectual would seek to reverse this decision by making substantive arguments why funding should be restored, and how the budget should be prioritized. Calling your opponents stupid, irrational or vindictive and building straw men about how the American university system will now sink into the muck is not a terribly effective strategy if you are seeking to marshall “educated” support.
“Calling your opponents stupid, irrational or vindictive” – who’s doing that?
“American university system will now sink into the muck is not a terribly effective strategy if you are seeking to marshall “educated” support.”
– there are real world examples of schools declining in quality due to lack of adequate funding. I live in a state that’s usually 49th-50th in per-student-spending on the college level. The result? Top students leave the state; schools have dropped in rankings; it’s hard for all but the main campus to attract top faculty.
I toured the state’s main land-grant campus recently and then spoke to an admissions representative. The rising senior I was with – a friend of the family – has poor grades and poor ACTs – 22. “22 is good!” the adcom lady beamed. “That’s a solid score for many of our freshmen!”
Brilliant example of what happens when you impoverish your state schools: the brighter students don’t want to attend.
Au contraire, tenure was established precisely to insulate faculty hiring, promotion, and dismissal decisions from political meddling by trustees, influential donors, and powerful political figures. It existed at most U.S. colleges and universities as an informal tradition rather than a contractual right from sometime in the 19th century until about the middle of the 20th century, when it became contractual right
I’d like to see your source for that factoid. In fact, Wisconsin is almost exactly at the national average in median household income ($50,395 Wisconsin v. $50,502 U.S. in 2014). Yet Wisconsin is consistently below the national average in spending on higher education, whether you measure it by spending per capita of the state’s population (Wisconsin $232.97 v. U.S. average of $242.45 in FY 2011, per data provided by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems) or spending per FTE student in the state’s public higher education institutions (Wisconsin 96% of U.S. average in FY 2012, per a College Board-funded study by the State Higher Education Executive Officers).
That said, there’s no obvious correlation between state expenditures on public higher education and the quality of the state’s public universities. California spends only slightly more than the national average per FTE student (112%), but it has outstanding flagships in UC Berkeley and UCLA. Michigan and Virginia also have outstanding public flagships, but those states spend only 71% and 72% of the national average respectively. North Carolina, with another fine flagship, is one of the heaviest spenders at 148% of the national average. Wyoming (238%) and Alaska (202%) spend more than twice the national average per FTE student, yet their universities aren’t exactly world-renowned. Colorado (43%), Ohio (62%), and Pennsylvania (66%) spend well below the national average, yet their flagships are well above average. At the end of the day, state spending probably has a bigger impact on tuition rates than on institutional quality. Institutions like the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia that have built up unusually large endowments for public institutions are better able to withstand a lower level of state expenditures than many other public universities would be. Also, overall state spending figures don’t tell you how much of that money is going to the flagship as opposed to the state’s other colleges and universities.
I’m not sure state budget cuts will destroy the University of Wisconsin as a first-class public university, though they might; faculty salaries at Wisconsin are already well below those of many if its peer institutions. Loss of tenure, however, could drive away many of the best people on the faculty rather quickly.
The purpose of tenure is and should remain the protection of academic freedom. Not insulating people who inject themselves into the political process from budget cuts. And I freely admit I don’t understand the ins and outs of tenure, but if what is being reported is accurate, the tenure rules in Wisconsin will now be similar to the tenure rules at other state schools, meaning they are up to the administration of the college, rather than the legislature. If that is true, why would it cause a drain? Salary, sure. And that is the kind of argument that should be made about the budget. Not that walker is a poopy head. Which is my point.
@katliamom, your last post referred to under educated, highly manipulated masses. The next post said Walker’s “problem” is he is not very smart. The post prior to your previous referred to a vindictive and slightly irrational pol. You can’t just ignore that line of argument. And obviously, the rub is what is an adequate level of funding. So far, the argument has been that the funding is inadequate because Walker is stupid and vindictive. I still don’t find that very persuasive.
I am not trying to convince you of anything. I am neither a citizen of Wisconsin nor an employee of the University system. I have no idea what the correct fiscal priority is for that state. I simply believe that matters such as these deserve to be dealt with seriously, rather than by personal vilification. I also would ask that you not ascribe positions to me that I have not taken. You asked who was calling their opponents stupid, vindictive and irrational. I provided three examples.
As I said earlier in the thread, all tenured faculty know they can be laid off. So your interpretation (“not insulating people who inject themselves into the political process from budget cuts”) is totally off base, but the fact that you’re not in academics partly explains this. Many people who don’t understand tenure perpetuate this myth, along with others.
In Wisconsin. From what I can gather through the noise, Walker’s budget cuts 150m in each of the next two years from the projected budget for the UW system. My understanding is the budget also reforms the tenure system by letting the regents set tenure policy rather than the legislature, and that such a policy is more in conformity with normal tenure practices at other state universities. I am sure there are substantive arguments to be made pro and con for each. But I don’t see how they are necessarily linked other than the baseline argument that giving the regents control of tenure policies allows them to adjust staffing in conformance with funding?
I know that in the past, tenured faculty lost their jobs as direct result of state funding cuts. One example is the University of Florida, which recently cut close to 10% of its tenured and tenure-track positions, replacing many of them with part-timers and adjuncts. Tenure means bupkis if there’s no money.
Oh please.
Actions have consequences.
If you can’t stand up for your actions without having to hide behind a safety net, you convictions are hollow and not worth having.
Besides, how exactly did Walker determine which teachers were voting against him and what specific actions did he take against those individuals? Or is this yet another straw man against that big ol’ boogeyman Walker?
I think the perception among faculty and staff at UW Madison is not so much that Walker is going after particular individuals, but rather that he is intent on taking it out on the university as a whole because of a perception, not entirely unjustified, that the faculty and larger university community, and for that matter the entire city of Madison, are overwhelmingly liberal and anti-Walker.
But if they want to go after particular individuals, they probably can. Walker’s staff have been known to identify names on recall petitions. There was, for example, the case of the student leader from UW Platteville who was seeking a position as student representative on the Board of Regents. He was by all accounts an ambitious and effective go-getter type, and a straight arrow, majoring in engineering with a double minor in math and business, founder of two successful businesses, active in various student clubs and organizations, not particularly political one way or the other. His father was a Lutheran minister, his mother a schoolteacher. He mounted a campaign for a Regents position, got the attention of the governor’s staff, made his best pitch through two rounds of interviews with all indications that he would be appointed, until it came up at the last minute that as an 18 year old freshman he had signed a “recall Walker” petition—in solidarity (he said) with his Mom who felt her job and livelihood were threatened by Walker’s K-12 budget cuts, education policies, stripping teachers of collective bargaining rights, etc. At that point the kid was informed he wouldn’t be appointed, and instead the seat went to another student who had not signed a recall petition.
Petty, if you ask me. (I’ll leave it to your judgment whether you think it was “vindictive”). Also brazenly partisan, despite a legal standard that says appointments to the Board of Regents are to be made without “partisan tests.”
Ah, yes. The Great Northern Wall. Well, it worked for China for centuries.
On the other hand, the Mongol hordes eventually did break through the Great Wall, or went around it, or something. So I guess even with our own Great Wall, eventually we might see Canadian hordes descending on us from the steppes of Saskatchewan on snowmobiles, brandishing their hockey sticks and striking terror into the hearts of every man, woman, and child in North Dakota.
I’m sure Walker must know that’s the longest border in the world between two countries, at 5,525 miles. A heck of a public works project. And I’m sure Walker must also know that at least 1,700 miles of that border are defined by water bodies. I’m wondering what he proposes to do with, say, the Great Lakes? Build the wall on our side? On the Canadian side? Smack down the middle?
First, let me apologize for the digression I am about to embark on. But it is one of those things that drives me nuts, so I am going to vent a bit.
Here is the actual quote from the Journal Sentinel article referenced above in support of the statement that appointments to the Board of Regents are to be made without partisan tests
If you look at the language, those are two weird sentences. The first is simple enough. Appointment of regents is a political act in the power of the Governor, with the consent of the Senate. But the second certainly appears to be internally contradictory. First we have the passive declaration that the law does not explicitly prohibit doing what the author wants the reader to infer Walker has done, fail to appoint the kid for partisan reasons. But then the sentence continues, and contains a quote which pretty much refutes the earlier passive declaration. Obviously, the intent of the passage is to leave the reader with the impression that “no sectarian or partisan tests” may be applied in the appointment of Regents. Clearly, this is the take away, as evidenced by the above post.
But the quoted language is very similar to the standard civil service employment language found in many states’ laws on hiring state employees. And the fact that the writer jumped between appointment to position to employee seemed very strained to me. It also seemed interesting to me that partisanship was prohibited in the doing of what is essentially a political act. So I blew off about thirty minutes and looked up the Wisconsin statutes governing the U of Wisconsin Board of Regents. I could find no language that indicates the governor or the senate are proscribed from using partisanship in the appointment or approval of Regents. Maybe it is there, and finding it would just take more effort than I am willing to put in. The only place I could find the quoted language was in prior year’s statutes governing hiring policies established by the Board of Regents for the University system. In other words, the quote used to infer that Walker was proscribed from withdrawing the appointment came from a statute which dealt with policies promulgated by the Board of Regents to be used in making hiring decisions for employees of the system.
And that is exactly why so few people who are not predisposed to a certain world view distrust the press.
So a kid that signed a petition to recall Walker is upset that Walker did not appoint him to a board. People in Illinois are shocked that such a thing could ever happen.
The transparently political nature of the Regents selection process in Wisconsin is one of the principal reasons many faculty at UW Madison fear the tenure policy recently adopted by the Regents isn’t a satisfactory substitute for the statutory protection tenured faculty enjoyed until recently. They could tear up that tenure policy and substitute an entirely different policy anytime they wanted. These are Walker’s hand-picked agents. Their terms are staggered, but by now a Walker-appointed majority is in firm control.
The governing body of the public flagship is not nearly as partisan in many other states. The University of Michigan’s Regents are state constitutional officers, elected by the citizens; they aren’t appointed by or beholden to the governor, and neither the governor nor the legislature has much say over curriculum, admissions policies, tuition rates, university budgets, personnel policies, or any other aspect of the university’s operations; the Regents themselves are constitutionally responsible for all that, and the legislature’s only job is to decide how much money the state will contribute. Minnesota attempts to make Regent selection non-partisan through a convoluted appointment process: a non-partisan Regent Candidate Advisory Council invites open applications for the position, screens and interviews applicants, and recommends at least two and not more than four candidates for each open Regent position. A joint convention of both houses of the legislature then elects Regents from those lists of recommended candidates. I’ve been in Minnesota for 12 years now, and I lived in Michigan for about 20 years and have maintained close ties there through family and friends my entire life. There are occasional squabbles about how much support should be coming to those universities through legislative appropriations, but nothing like the partisan rancor Wisconsin has experienced in recent years. It’s hard to imagine a worse way of selecting a governing body for a public university.
@bclintonk. That is the kind of thing I am talking about. A process argument, that putting tenure in the hands of the Wisconsin regents is a bad thing because the Wisconsin process for appointing regents is more partisan that in other states with similar tenure policies, is to my mind much more likely to persuade undecided voters. Instead though, arguments like that made in the Sentinel personalize the issue by stretching things to make it appear Walker is personally doing something shady.
@bclintonk Also brazenly partisan, despite a legal standard that says appointments to the Board of Regents are to be made without “partisan tests.”
I disagree.
Anyone who said they signed a petition just to support his mommy, and makes a “spur of the moment decision” on something important like a recall like that should not hold any position related to policy. He would have been better off making a non-emotional argument about the best thing for the State, not for his personal issues.
Besides, asking if you tried to get your ultimate boss fired is not exactly a “partisan test”. LOL.